My company, Tinkertanker, is moving from our Bukit Merah office of 5 years over to Jalan Pemimpin.

It’s our fourth “real” office after we moved out of a study, and I’ll remember it as an office where we hosted a lot of friends, partners, and visitors; where we had a meeting room the laser cutter venting went through (loudly); where we got through the pandemic (and when Engineering Good kept the lights on during lockdown) and published a book; where we over-engineered our automations and decorations; where we continuously got complained at by management by putting random nonsense like a TARDIS outside our door; where we watched colleagues and students and interns join, leave, visit and grow.

I’ll miss the nearby noodle queue, the mysteriously large number of roadside chickens, and the vague worry that the mezzanine would collapse on us in the meeting room whenever there were too many people upstairs.

Pictured: Memories from the old office; the old office being cleared out; fun electronics projects we really should have thrown away earlier; a preview of the new office with fun pink stairs and a lift that I got trapped in on the very first day.

* ok I know sorry sorry

About a year ago, Daniel, a 19-year-old New Zealander, gave me a call, and asked if he could just come by our office and hang out and learn things quietly on his own. He wasn’t sure what to do for university, or if he even wanted to study at all. He was aware we had a techie internship programme, but didn’t feel qualified enough to join us and get paid for it. 

We thought, why not? The worst that could happen was he’d come in, and stop showing up after a while. (Which is what happened with some other guy.) 

He never stopped showing up. 

He learned a whole bunch of programming, made himself very useful, we offered him a proper paid internship, and now he’s off to study CS. Read his story at our blog.

Data that answers important questions such as ‘where does my surname rank on the Chinese leaderboard?’ (12th) and ‘are people named “tall” actually concentrated in the northern part of the country?’. (Pshht, tiny Asians.)

If you’ve ever tried any kind of vector-based design, watch this dude draw iOS 7 in freakin’ Microsoft Word. I didn’t mean to watch to the end, but I ended up staring at the screen for 10 minutes in slack-jawed amazement.

Also, this comment:

This guy is making iPhones in Word and I’m just sitting here trying to center my title…

Neil Gaiman on reading:

Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying if you liked those you’ll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King’s name is mentioned.

(There were many more important, but less hilarious, bits than this quote.)

A look at how one high school is introducing programming into all its classes, even unrelated subjects. Some of these are eyebrow-raise-worthy at first glance:

Brown says she’s considering a poetry unit using code language. […] Tina Farrell, who heads the Performing Arts department, is interested in experimenting with live-coding performances, where students would use software to compose and perform music with scripts they write.

But just _imagine_ if these worked.

Also, new to me, linked from the article: [TurtleBits](http://turtlebits.net/), an interactive turtle learning tool. Still one of my favourite intro programming resources.